<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> After a two-year investigation of the for-profit higher education industry, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) on Monday unveiled an exhaustive report on the colleges' business practices, highlighting schools that charge excessively high tuition and shortchange academic investments in order to maximize revenues.

The report, featuring hundreds of pages of research drawn from internal company e-mails and statistics, concludes that the federal government has failed to protect students from misleading sales pitches and poor quality programs, and has not adequately safeguarded the $32 billion in taxpayer dollars that flow to the industry.

"American taxpayers are the single biggest investor in for-profit colleges, yet the government that holds their trust has little ability to ensure that they get the return on investment they deserve: educational and career success for the students who enroll," the report said. "Congress must put in place a much more rigorous regulatory structure that incentivizes the sector to make the financial investments necessary to result in higher student success."

...Harkin's staff found that 30 large companies that own for-profit colleges employed more than 35,000 recruiters, yet had only about 3,500 employees working in career services and 12,400 working in student support.

..The 30 companies examined in the report spent less on student instruction than on marketing and advertising. Student instruction also cost less than the money that went to corporate profit. In 2009, the companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing and generated $3.2 billion in pre-tax profit, yet spent only $3.2 billion on instruction.

"For-profit colleges charge exorbitant tuition, they provide an inferior education, they have sky-high dropout rates," Harkin said Monday. "So how do they recruit a steady stream of students? The answer is these are marketing machines."

On average, the for-profit colleges analyzed spent <span style='font-size: 14pt'>22.7 percent of all revenue on marketing and advertising, far more than most public institutions, the report said, while spending 17 percent on instruction</span> -- an average of about $2,050 per student. By contrast, Portland Community College in Oregon spends $5,953 per student on instruction, and about 1.2 percent of its budget, or $185 per student, on marketing.</div></div>